Point Lobos Enchants Rangers, Visitors Alike : Ecology: The reserve is about to grow larger as well. The nonprofit Big Sur Land Trust purchased a nearby ranch, once earmarked for a hotel, to lease to the state. It will become part of the park.

. . . do you remember at all

The beauty and strangeness of this place?

--”Tamar,” Robinson Jeffers

*

Glen McGowan stood on the abrupt edge of the continent, gazing through the gnarled limbs of rare cypresses clinging to storm-sculpted granite.

Beyond glittered a green-blue sea.

“After 12 years here I’m still in awe,” the state park ranger said. “Every day I come out here, look and say, ‘This is an incredible place.’ ”

This place is Point Lobos State Reserve, a dramatic meeting of land and ocean that enchants scientists, artists and lovers of nature with its rich wildlife and varied scenery.

The small reserve, four miles south of Carmel, is considered the crown jewel among California’s state parks. Seven miles of trails take visitors to rugged headlands, white-sand beaches nestled in spectacular coves, forests and rolling meadows.

Its 550 acres on land and 750 underwater are home to hundreds of different plants and animals. More than 300,000 people visit Point Lobos reserve each year.

“It’s an area of astounding beauty you don’t find anywhere else,” said Jeff Norman, a consulting biologist who lives at Big Sur, 20 miles to the south. “It’s what people remember.”

And now the jewel will become even brighter--and much bigger. The Big Sur Land Trust recently bought 1,312 acres of wooded hills of Point Lobos Ranch to the east for $11.1 million. The nonprofit conservation group is leasing the land--once earmarked for a large hotel and other development--to the state. Eventually it will become part of the park.

“Point Lobos Ranch is a magnificent opportunity for everyone to really appreciate the beauty and variety of nature we have along the Central California Coast,” said Karin Strasser Kauffman, a Monterey County supervisor whose district includes the reserve.

“This is an opportunity to maintain the land in its pristine state and open it up to public use,” she said.

The deal, in addition to preserving the stunning view, will protect the complex, related ecology of both the existing park and its future addition. Mule deer, bobcats, foxes--even an occasional mountain lion or black bear--regularly cross two-lane Highway 1 dividing the two areas.

More visible and audible are the California sea lions that bask and bark on the ocean rocks. The big, noisy animals gave the park its name through the earlier Spanish designation of “Punta de los Lobos Marinos”--Sea Wolf Point.

Harbor seals sleep on the edges of coves whose clear blue or green attests to the sharp plunge of land into sea and lack of clay soil to muddy it. Sea otters float on their backs among the kelp as they eat abalone, and gray whales pass offshore on their annual migration.

Point Lobos boasts one of the only two naturally occurring stands of Monterey Cypress. The other stand of the picturesque, storm-knotted trees is at Pebble Beach, just north of Carmel.

A trail winding through the small cypress forest on a rocky head is the most popular path in the reserve, according to McGowan and volunteer docents.

“We’re afraid they’ll catch on to how great it is to be here, and they’ll charge us to work here,” said Nancy Stabler, a docent from Pacific Grove.

Point Lobos’ beauty has long entranced writers, artists and photographers. Lore has it that Robert Louis Stevenson, who visited the Monterey region in the late 1800s, used Big Dome, an imposing granite rock overlooking the sea, as the model of Spyglass Hill in “Treasure Island.”

It was a favorite place for photographers Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, who lived nearby. What was once called Pebbly Beach was renamed after Weston several years ago. Robinson Jeffers set his dramatic poem “Tamar” at Point Lobos, saying it was inspired in part by its “strange, introverted and storm-twisted beauty.”

Point Lobos is as rich in history as it is in scenery. It was the site of Ohlone Indian hunting and fishing camps, and a legend persists that it changed hands in a card game during Mexican rule.

In the 1850s, Chinese fishing families settled at Point Lobos, where one of their cabins remains as a museum. Whaling, a coal mine, gravel quarry, dairy farms and an abalone cannery followed. It provided dramatic backdrops for many movies, including the 1940 classic “Rebecca,” though most filming is no longer allowed.

In the 1890s, the coal company sold prospective lots at Point Lobos for a proposed town to have been called Carmelito. But those plans ended when local entrepreneur Alexander M. Allan bought the property lot by lot over 20 years starting at the turn of the century.

Three years after Allan’s death in 1930, his daughters sold the land to the state for $631,000.

Allan family heirs and hotel developer Ted Richter were the owners of Point Lobos Ranch. It was last year when they approached the Big Sur Land Trust, seeking to take the organization up on its standing offer to buy the property, said Brian Steen, executive director of the trust. The lease will allow the state to buy the land over a period of several years.

Point Lobos Ranch will add to the current reserve’s beauty and store of natural rarities, Norman said. The new property has a grove of Gowan cypresses, even rarer than Monterey cypresses with only two tiny known stands, he said. The other also is at Pebble Beach.